Wednesday, December 21, 2011

Building A Better Convenience Store


If you haven't been to the corner convenience store at the Sheridan Plaza (Sheridan and Wilson) in a couple months, you should take a look!  It's undergone renovations, and it's expanded into the retail space next door, so now it has a coffee shop, wider aisles, a deli section, and great produce and fresh foods.  It's always been our favorite bodega, but it's really stepped it up lately.  Very impressive.

11 comments:

  1. I agree on stepping it up. The people that work there have always been super friendly. Especially the ladies that work behind the counter. Great prices and produce.

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  2. Wow nice, and this nice for the ENTIRE CITY nice.

    Sheridan Plaza Apts, Why is it called Plaza? Its an okay name just makes me think of a strip mall. So this is the Nice Tall Building across from the Horrible Mcdonalds.... Good.

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  3. I go in there all the time. The changes they made were a definite upgrade. The people working the counter are always very nice. Glad to see things are going so well over there.

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  4. This is a great store. The employees always help me and are very nice.

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  5. It's called the Sheridan Plaza because that was the name of the hotel that it used to be in the first half of the last century. It was one of the most upscale hotels in the city when Uptown was the place to be.

    In the days before strip malls the term plaza was more upscale than we think of it today.

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  6. Everything about this building's restoration has been great...Horizon has been working a lot on the building they recently purchased further north on Sheridan...hoping for similar care.

    Shame so many of these gems were lost to cash 4 golds, pawn shops and mcdonalds.

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  7. The buildings that don't remain didn't go away due to McDonalds or Cash 4 Gold. They went away because of deferred maintenance by the owners. If you've ever spoken to anyone who had anything to do with the restoration of any of Uptown's revived buildings----the Uptown Broadway Building, the one at Broadway and Lawrence where Bank of America is now, the Borders building----you'd have heard how bad those buildings were----how much worse they were than expected or disclosed. The Bank of America building----it had a basement full of sand. Those horrible 1960s steel sheets that covered it before the rehab? That was the owner's cheap solution to restoring a crumbling building. All those buildings were restored at great cost overruns. We are lucky they had tenacious owners with deep pockets, and we are very lucky to have them back, along with the Bridgeview Bank building, which is undergoing a multi-year rehab right now. Buildings that didn't have great owners, didn't have money invested in them, well, those are the ones that turned into strip malls and McDonalds. It's not like someone said "Here's a sturdy old building in great shape, so let's tear it down and put in a Cash For Gold strip mall." In the end, it's all about what has been built well, maintained well, and who has the money and investors to do it. We are lucky that Uptown has a lot of people who were willing to take on some white elephants and turn them back into beautiful properties. Not everyone has the money, and some buildings are too far gone to save, or just not built well to start with.

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  8. @gg

    You are spot on! I would add that a lot of Uptown's vintage buildings were lost to the infamous "landlord fires" to cash in on insurance money. A sad sad chapter in our history.

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  9. You are both so correct. People forget that we are starting almost from zero in rebuilding many of our beautiful old city neighborhoods, and that those neighborhoods took terrible mistreatment during the post-WW2 period with its massive disinvestment in cities and flight to the suburbs.

    We've acted to restore our cities in a nick of time. It's still too late for many of them, like poor Detroit. Chicago is fortunate to have so much spectacularly good architecture, and to be so relatively intact and populated, that we're not starting with nothing the way so many other cities are.

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  10. I.m glad the store is doing so well, i stop in there once in a while its a good break from the routine.

    Amen Northcoast...these vintage buildings are cultural assets and once they are gone we are left with an empty lot or a cheap excuse of a "modern" building. With some excepions, some contemporary architecture is awesome.

    I am really worried about the Majestic. It is in the crosshairs of the Wilson Station reno because it is at the foot of the bridge getting demolished.

    Vive Majestueux!

    http://uptownarts.blogspot.com/2012/02/majestic-in-motion.html

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  11. The gentlemen who have taken this establishment over are super friendly and have the community in their soul. It is a great corner market that has great fresh products and more. Make a point to visit soon!

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